Measuring the fitness relationship

Abstract

It is widely acknowledged that the system functionality captured in a system model has to match organisational requirements available in the business model. However, such a matching is rarely used to support design strategies. We believe that appropriate measures of what we refer to as the fitness relationship can facilitate design decisions. The paper proposes criteria and associated generic metrics to quantify to which extent there is a fit between the business and the system which supports it. In order to formulate metrics independent of specific formalisms to express the system and the business models, we base our proposal on the use of ontologies. This also contributes to provide a theoretical foundation to our proposal. In order to illustrate the use of the proposed generic metrics we show in the paper, how to derive a set of specific metrics from the generic ones and we illustrate the use of the specific metrics in a case study.